Common cellular telephones, Personal Communications Service (PCS) equipment and other personal communications devices (PCDs), are widely used in wireless communications. With these devices the quality, or clarity, of the wireless communications depends greatly upon having adequate signal strength for transmitting and receiving wireless communications. Generally, in the case of cellular telephones, when a user desires to place a cellular telephone call, the user enters a desired telephone number to be called and initiates the send, or transmit, action to place the call and thereby establish wireless communications. Upon establishing wireless communications, toll charges are incurred for the call, regardless of whether or not adequate signal strength exists for ensuring a high quality, or clear, communication.
Some common cellular telephones and personal communications devices do provide for a visual indication of the received signal strength level, or quality, by providing a received signal strength indicator or RSSI. The RSSI may be comprised of a display of a character or characters, such as multiple asterisks or dots, used to indicate the relative signal strength. For example, a display of one asterisk, or dot, could be used to correlate to an RSSI level of 1 while a display of four asterisk, or dots, could correlate to an RSSI level of 4. Table 1 sets out an examples RSSI levels relative to the actual received signal strength.
FIG. 1 illustrates a method of common cellular telephone or PCS equipment in initiating/completing wireless communications. The received signal strength indicator allows a user to visually determine that the signal strength may not be sufficient to ensure high quality communications. However, upon initiating a send action, a call will generally be completed by the cellular telephone or personal communication device, despite the fact that the RSSI indicates that the received signal strength may not be sufficient to ensure clear wireless communications. (See FIG. 1, steps 1-5). Thus, communications charges will be incurred for the call/communication regardless of whether or not it is clear, or of high quality. Of course, if a user notes that the RSSI indicates inadequate signal strength soon enough, the user may manually terminate the initiation of the wireless communications by actuating the end call or terminate function and thereby preclude charges for a call which would most likely be unclear.
The present invention is directed to overcoming the need for manual intervention in order to preclude initiation of wireless communications which may be of unsuitable quality. More particularly, the present invention seeks to overcome the above noted shortcomings of common cellular and personal communications devices by providing for a method of establishing clear cellular telephone communications which automatically precludes the initiation of a wireless communication where the received signal strength does not meet or exceed a predetermined reference value which correlates to a signal strength substantially sufficient to ensure clear, or high quality, communications.